Did Steve Wright get a fair trial in Ipswich?

[Derrick]

Derrick, you obviously have failed to recognise my contention that the Steve Wright conviction was not just a police mistake. They knew that they had charged the wrong suspect within days of charging him but it was just an impossibility for the police and or the CPS to publicly admit that they had made a mistake.
Thats why they brought in the accomplice theory.
Thats why they denied him a chance to appeal.
Thats why they keep him incommunicado. You try writing to him in Long Lartin jail and see for yourself.
He sacked his first lawyer. The second one wasnt much better as I have pointed out already when he jumped to request an easy sentence from the judge before he had even consulted Wright. He believed Wright was guilty and yet he defended him. This lawyer had been approached by myself before the trial and rejected evidence and didnt even want to listen.

Hi Noel
If you really care about the Wright case then contact Wright's solicitor or MP and mention that Bob Woffinden (independent journalist) and Karen Voisey (BBC Wales) won a precedent case, in the House of Lords against the Home Secretary in the Simms and O'Brien case in 2000 whereby convicted prisoners who protest their innocence have the right to speak to journalists; I understand that Wright has protested his innocence vehemently.

See here for Simms and O'Brien ruling stuff:

http://www.innocent.org.uk/misc/steyn_judgment.html

Derrick

[noel o'gara]

[

QUOTE=Derrick;153333]Hi Noel
I find it hard to fathom what your real interest is in this case.

From the Ronald Castree case it would seem that you and your "colleague" Patrick Cullinane had very little interest in the well being of your client.

By that I mean Cullinane became Castree's appointed legal representative and then got himself done on a contempt of court charge for tape recording court procedures.

You rant and rave about how Castree did not get a fair trial. If you and the idiot Patrick really believed that then you would have obeyed the rules and got him a decent barrister and played from there and exposed the Peter Sutcliffe connection, etc, in court.

As far as Castree is concerned you have played fast and loose with a man's liberty. He was only convicted on the weight of LCN DNA (we all know how imperfect that is) and very dodgy circumstantial evidence as you well know.

Castree has fathered at least 2 children but the killer of Lesley Molseed was of a very low sperm count, H+ in fact. It wasn't Kiszko as he was a complete Jaffa.

As you have said the previous sexual assualt conviction against Castree was probably a prank gone wrong that was instigated by a couple of girls out to wind him up. Castree did not even receive a custodial sentence for it.

Why did you and Cullinane **** up Castree's defence by acting like a right pair of idiots?

Derrick[/QUOTE]

Derrick, you obviously have failed to recognise my contention that the Steve Wright conviction was not just a police mistake. They knew that they had charged the wrong suspect within days of charging him but it was just an impossibility for the police and or the CPS to publicly admit that they had made a mistake.
Thats why they brought in the accomplice theory.
Thats why they denied him a chance to appeal.
Thats why they keep him incommunicado. You try writing to him in Long Lartin jail and see for yourself.
He sacked his first lawyer. The second one wasnt much better as I have pointed out already when he jumped to request an easy sentence from the judge before he had even consulted Wright. He believed Wright was guilty and yet he defended him. This lawyer had been approached by myself before the trial and rejected evidence and didnt even want to listen.

As for Castree, when we met him in Armley jail in Leeds he didnt even have a biro. We had to be sniffed by dogs and searched like criminals before we could meet him for a period of time and I could write a large chapter in a book of how difficult it was to get that meeting.
His own lawyer from free legal aid police panel, had been stringing him along for months and he was grasping at a very weak straw, hoping for his next bail hearing as he was on remand trying to prepare a defence.
He gave Patrick Cullinane written permission to be his legal adviser if he failed to get out on bail at an imminent bail hearing in Bradford court.
Patrick and I attended that hearing and we were asked to give up our seats by a policeman who was managing the relatives of Lesley Molseed.
We refused to move because we were in early and had the front row of a small public annexe to the court that you could barely see the judge and you couldnt see the lawyers or the accused or any jurors. Talk about justice open to the public??? but thats another story.
Anyway the cop who asked us to move wouldnt give us his name and after the application failed and we were sitting outside in the hallway, I saw that cop and took his picture with my mobile phone camera.
Later on he was waiting with others at the exit and arrested us both for contempt of court. Unknown to me Patrick had been recording the hearing with a tape recorder in his inside pocket and it was found by the police. He wanted to ensure that he had a true record of the hearing so he could analyse it and prepare the next application if needed. That was a serious crime? That policeman held us in handcuffs, took all our possessions and brought us before the same judge Stephen Gullick after the court ended. Locked up overnight and brought in handcuffs the next day to hear the cop telling lies to the judge 'we were filming in court' etc and kept behind a glass screen under microphones to the judge he sentenced me two weeks and Patrick to four months 'to ensure he wouldnt be able to interfere with Castree's trial'
So much for due process, British justice and a fair trial for both of us and for the defenceless Castree who was stitched up for a murder by low copy number DNA and no expert evidence to counter this and his legal adviser in jail.
And you say we screwed Castree.
Why dont you address the liars and the corrupt judge who set him up and ask who are the real criminals?

Derrick, dont put blind trust in the courts. Ask any of the hundreds of innocent men and women who were stitched up and years later released.

They got Fred West, Brady and Hindley bang to rights and tripped over body parts before getting Denis Nilson. Murderers like Dr Shipman were convicted on evidence beyond all doubt. But many are convicted because everybody is wishing that the accused can be convicted and often policemen abuse that trust with exagerated evidence and they get the media support to convince the public.
In Castree's case they plastered the news nationally that they had traced him by his DNA from the day of his arrest. He never stood a chance of defending himself before a jury.
I tried to help Castree and failed so far.
The case in Ipswich is more recent and well known and it has all the ingredients of a stitch up. I dont know these men but I have much experience of lying and bent police with the ripper and I can help them.
If it had been you Derrick, you would welcome my help. So far Wright knows very little about my work because he cant get his mail.

Even if Wright has to stay in jail for the next twenty years, the evidence that I have shone a light on will remain.

How about the picture above that was in Tom Stephens flat? It depicted a near naked lady with outstretched arms and her hair pulled up to a point with one leg slightly raised. It was the exact pose that Anneli and Annette were placed in by their killer.
Could it be a coincidence?
Should the jury not have seen that?

[Derrick]

Hi Noel
I find it hard to fathom what your real interest is in this case.

From the Ronald Castree case it would seem that you and your "colleague" Patrick Cullinane had very little interest in the well being of your client.

By that I mean Cullinane became Castree's appointed legal representative and then got himself done on a contempt of court charge for tape recording court procedures.

You rant and rave about how Castree did not get a fair trial. If you and the idiot Patrick really believed that then you would have obeyed the rules and got him a decent barrister and played from there and exposed the Peter Sutcliffe connection, etc, in court.

As far as Castree is concerned you have played fast and loose with a man's liberty. He was only convicted on the weight of LCN DNA (we all know how imperfect that is) and very dodgy circumstantial evidence as you well know.

Castree has fathered at least 2 children but the killer of Lesley Molseed was of a very low sperm count, H+ in fact. It wasn't Kiszko as he was a complete Jaffa.

As you have said the previous sexual assualt conviction against Castree was probably a prank gone wrong that was instigated by a couple of girls out to wind him up. Castree did not even receive a custodial sentence for it.

Why did you and Cullinane **** up Castree's defence by acting like a right pair of idiots?

Derrick

[noel o'gara]

Noel,

One has to go on media reports of the trial and also use your brains to fill in the missing links.

No, it doesn't call for brains, it calls for imagination, of which you seem to have a lot. The Daily Mail story makes no mention or even allusion to footprints--it simply suggests that for one person to get the body to where it was found it would likely have to have been dragged. The "footprints" on the ground are all in your mind.

Don.

That Mail article stated that there was no evidence of dragging. the implication being that she was carried. How would you carry a body over soft ground and not leave any imprint?
Would Wright have the strength to do it?

Stephens told a journalist that you could pick up Tania with one hand and the others were like skeletons.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2006/12/19/ripper-suspect-i-ve-no-alibis-115875-18284477/

this is the interview that he gave the Sunday Mirror printed the day before he was arrested. This interview was calculated to force their hand to arrest him.

[Supe]

Noel,

One has to go on media reports of the trial and also use your brains to fill in the missing links.

No, it doesn't call for brains, it calls for imagination, of which you seem to have a lot. The Daily Mail story makes no mention or even allusion to footprints--it simply suggests that for one person to get the body to where it was found it would likely have to have been dragged. The "footprints" on the ground are all in your mind.

Don.

[noel o'gara]

Ah I see Noel, first, you have no clue whether there was any footprints, whatsoever, but you just presume/assume there was and speak about how this imaginary evidence wasn't presented at trial as if it was a fact. .

One has to go on media reports of the trial and also use your brains to fill in the missing links.
If you read this report

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-517398/The-final-fear-Did-Suffolk-Strangler-Steve-Wright-helper.html

in particular the paragraph,
'Another mystery was how Anneli Alderton's body appeared to have been carried to its final resting place by two people, as there was no evidence of it being dragged through the foliage'

Now how could this confusion happen without footprints?
Try to carry a 7 stone bag of potatoes wrapped in a blanket several yards into wooded damp land, not grassland, place it down and then remove your blanket, move to the top to arrange the top and perform a few more actions with it and then walk back perhaps treading over your earlier footsteps in, there would almost certainly be some trace of those footprints in and out, and that would explain why the police were confused because they didnt match Wright.
It must be obvious that nothing resembling Steve Wright's size footprints were found and that would explain why there is little or no talk of footprints on the record but footprints there would have been, beside the bodies as the killer squatted down to rearrange the victim for the police.
There is nothing imaginary about footsteps in the clay, left by the weight of a man carrying a dead body.
If those footprints were smaller than Wright's footprints then that would raise the question that he was not the killer, and so to keep their case right, the suggestion was that he might have had an accomplice.
Even if the imprints matched the other suspect, that would not make the police own up to a mistake but it would certainly make them keep silent about it in court. as they did in the Kiszko and other cases.

[Derrick]

Kevin Nunn

...But lets not get diverted...

Hi Noel
I know what you are saying and I wasn't trying to divert the argument.

I was just thinking of this man Kevin Nunn who is serving 22 years for a crime he didn't commit.

Derrick.

[Derrick]

...It proved he had sex with them. It did not prove that he killed them....

Hi Noel
I agree that the DNA doesn't prove that Wright was the murderer.

What other evidence did the prosecution seek to rely on at trial? How did the defence counter this and was the judge's summing up a fair one?

When I have answers to these I will be in a better position to answer the question that is the title of this thread.

Derrick.

[Ally]

Ah I see Noel, first, you have no clue whether there was any footprints, whatsoever, but you just presume/assume there was and speak about how this imaginary evidence wasn't presented at trial as if it was a fact.

Second, your idea that a serial killer decided to go out of his way to stitch up another guy would make a nice fiction story. You should write it. Oh wait, you are.

Third, and how did two of the victims blood end up on his jacket? The killer planted that too, did he? Or was that the cops? I tell you, between super genius serial killers and evil stitch up cops, the world is a terrible place. And how wonderful that the serial killer is now able to control his impulses to murder people now that Wright is behind bars. A miracle indeedy.

[Natalie Severn]

Hi Noel,

I just dont know the extent or quality of the footprints but there must have been plenty of them

Well we would need to have more specific information than this ,particularly if what you are saying is so relevant to your case against the handling of the case by the police. Footprints can disappear from wet mud pretty quickly after all,so its no good calling the shots from thin air.

[noel o'gara]

Wright had been depicted as a devious killer who scroupulously hid the evidence. Washing his car at night and cleaning his flat was mentioned in various terms in the media but this would be the action of any man who wished to hide his sexual misbehaviour from his wife, who shared the car and flat with him.

His gloves were cited as accessories of a criminal.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2008/01/18/strangler-suspect-steve-wright-i-had-sex-with-4-of-the-girls-115875-20288987/

Surely if a man carried a body with his gloves on, the victim's DNA would be all over the outside of the gloves?
Would a devious killer not dispose of them while an innocent man would not?

and surely if Wright was really the killer of these girls he would not have been so stupid as to leave traces of his semen and DNA all over their bodies.
It simply bears out what this over sexed man says, that he used these prostitutes to satisfy his sexual urges.
Being innocent of the murders he felt safe in soliciting in Ipswich during that period and he had no reason to worry about police checks or cameras etc.

[noel o'gara]

Anyone else notice how he completely dodged the question?


You know what else didn't get an airing in court? The fingerprint on the murder weapon that didn't match Wrights, the DNA evidence left inside the wounds that didn't match Wrights, the tire tracks that ran over the body that didn't match Wrights car and the signed confession left at the scene that didn't match Wrights. You know why they didn't get aired in court? Because they didn't exist.

You know what did match? His DNA on the victims. Carpet fiber from his car on the victims. And yes, it is beyond the realm of coincidence that all five just happened to have been visited by two completely different men, one totally innocent and one their killer.

I didnt dodge it one bit Ally.
I just dont know the extent or quality of the footprints but there must have been plenty of them about as the killer first lay his victim's body down on a selected piece of the soft ground and then set up the lifeless and naked body for the police to discover, twice over. This was an experienced killer who was not fearful of the police and who took risks. He would have been on a high of emotion during all that time.

As you point out, the DNA of Wright was all over the last three victims but the other suspect also said his DNA would have been on them too.
I wonder how many other DNA profiles they found on these prostitutes who might have had a dozen sex encounters every night?
Wright had sexual relations with all bar the first girl Tania who only was in his car, and that would account for his DNA being on the three and confirm his business with these prostitutes who sold sexual services. It proved he had sex with them. It did not prove that he killed them

To answer your last statement.
It is entirely logical that all five victims were met by both suspects in the order in which they disappeared, if one is a killer bent on setting up the other man, who is oblivious of his situation and picking the girls up in order to satisfy his sexual urges, only for the girl to be returned by him to the street where the killer is waiting for Wright to drop her back on her beat. That killer then takes her back close to where Wright had earlier taken her, drugs her, strips her and kills her and dumps the body expecting that Wright gets the blame. He would almost certainly have to be a trusted friend of the girls.

And so these murders were not in the realm of coincidences by any stretch of the imagination. They were calculated and evil.

But there was a motive for the stalker to take such drastic actions.

[Ally]

Anyone else notice how he completely dodged the question?


You know what else didn't get an airing in court? The fingerprint on the murder weapon that didn't match Wrights, the DNA evidence left inside the wounds that didn't match Wrights, the tire tracks that ran over the body that didn't match Wrights car and the signed confession left at the scene that didn't match Wrights. You know why they didn't get aired in court? Because they didn't exist.

You know what did match? His DNA on the victims. Carpet fiber from his car on the victims. And yes, it is beyond the realm of coincidence that all five just happened to have been visited by two completely different men, one totally innocent and one their killer.

[noel o'gara]

Presumably then,by the logic of your own statement above ,so would Steven Wright tell all the lies under the sun----presuming him to be the killer?
However the statement is not true for every convicted killer.Ruth Ellis ,to take one example,knowing she faced death by hanging, fully admitted she had killed her lover,never revealed from whom she had got the gun and admitted that she had fully intended to kill him.
But your reasoning about the footprints is intriguing.Were there footprints or had they been washed away do you know?

An innocent person accused of murder would deny it vociforusly and it is for the accuser to show solid evidence that links him to the crime. In most cases of murder there is a mass of evidence that will prove guilt, ie a clear motive, lack of an alibi, ability to commit serious crime, witness evidence, and any direct smoking gun such as semen, blood stains, footprints,weapons etc.
Wright was a well known over-sexed punter who spent his money and time kerb crawling for sex kicks while his wife was at work.
This series of calculated killings of these vulnerable girls cannot be compared to Ruth Ellis, who shot somebody in a crime of passion.
These premeditated killings were committed for a very clear motive which will become clearer as we go.
The footprints left at the scene of the Ipswich murders didnt get much airing in court. Could it be because they didnt fit the man in the dock?

You can rest assured that if they did fit him they would have been headlined in the media. It left them scratching their heads for a long time. So the accomplice theory was suggested by the prosecution, to avert any comment on that issue. The police were covering their backsides.
Steve Wright got no chance to get an independant expert to examine them and being locked up for more than a year in a high security jail without even a pen, much less a directory or phone, he had no means of preparing a proper defence. The legal cost of help would be refused and he hadnt the means to pay experts.
His lawyer betrayed the fact that he believed in his guilt by requesting a lenient sentence from the judge immediately after the verdict was announced rather than consult his client. Wright himself was in a state of shock because he believed that the jury would acquit him.

[Tecs]

Noel,

Relax my friend.

If you read my whole post I was actually trying to be overall complimentary, sorry if that didn't come across. It was because I know from experience that most people have been very negative, dismissive and nasty about you over the years that I thought I would pre-empt that by pointing out that we all have different views and everybody's must be respected. As I said, somebody who has dedicated so long and so much of their time to any subject deserves to be listened to and respected.

Regarding the cases you mention, you'll get no argument from me about the police stitching people up and geting the wrong man. Stefan Kiszko's was the most disgraceful episode in police history for a very long time in my opinion, because in his case the police prosecuting him knew that he was innocent but didn't care. (and I'm aware that the officer who set him up was our old friend Dick Holland.) This is different to, say, the Bridgewater four who were a gang of armed scumbags (by their own admission) or other people guilty of other offences. I don't lose too much sleep over Paddy Hill of the Birmingham six for example, who was a very violent man who said that he had "no scruples about violence." He had 17 convictions for violence and admitted to carrying " a blade or machete." Of course it is wrong that innocent people are convicted for crimes that they didn't commit, but I would put Kiszko's (and others like him) case in a different category than the others I've just mentioned. Dragging a completely innocent person into a police station and fitting them up knowing that they are innocent is one of the worst kind of evils I can think of.

The parallel with the Ipswich case that I worry about is that the police time after time (Stagg, George etc) always go straight to the local "Mr Strange" thinking that it must be a local weirdo that did it, despite seeing time after time that it isn't.

Oh and when I'm Chief Constable, Don't worry I'll still talk to cadets like you! (Joke)

Regards,